


Kind Thoughts, Open Doors

by dango96



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: F/M, Fire Emblem: Three Houses Church Route, Fluff, Post-Timeskip | War Phase (Fire Emblem: Three Houses), Short & Sweet, Trust
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-10
Updated: 2019-12-10
Packaged: 2021-02-25 22:33:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,310
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21743035
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dango96/pseuds/dango96
Summary: Seteth finds himself revealing more and more to Byleth, getting careless with his many secrets. But oddly enough, he can't bring himself to mind, despite the dangers inherent in doing so.Spoilers for Seteth and Flayn's backstories, as well as Leonie's paralogue.
Relationships: My Unit | Byleth/Seteth
Comments: 18
Kudos: 197





	Kind Thoughts, Open Doors

Byleth, he suspected, was beginning to know too much.

Normally, even the hint that anyone was aware of their true identities put Seteth incredibly on edge. Whether it was someone questioning if Flayn was related to him in a different fashion than mere siblings, or prying into why she was the only known example of a Major Crest of Cethleann — every time it happened, it made him want to retreat to old ways, to go back to convents and caves, only exiting seclusion for rations and supplies.

If it weren’t for Flayn, perhaps he would not have bothered with such secrecy. He could defend himself, after all. But Flayn — his dear, sweet daughter — had not seen the true extent of humanity’s dark nature. She hadn’t witnessed Zanado in its prime, filled with the children of the Goddess, nor seen it cruelly burned and pillaged until their kind were near–extinct. She knew not what humans were capable of.

And that meant she was vulnerable. She trusted too much, too willingly. If he saw that innocence exploited, it would break him beyond saving.

But that trust — his daughter’s kind, naïve, persistent nature — was beginning to have a curious effect on him. Seeing her smile as brightly as the sun when surrounded by her peers, witnessing her delighting in the simple pleasure of their company, listening to her enthuse about her professor and her lessons...

It made Seteth want to trust, too. And Byleth was at the very heart of that feeling.

When Byleth accompanied them to the Rhodos Coast and discovered one of their well–kept secrets, he did not feel fear or apprehension, strangely enough. When she cast him an odd glance after his words to Indech at the lake, he considered if she might be smart enough to piece it together, and — found he did not entirely _mind_ the thought.

It shocked him, and alarmed him. Not that he was afraid, no — that he _wasn’t_.

Perhaps it was her awakening. Her fine green hair, her emerald eyes. Surely, these feelings stemmed from the fact that it was like getting to speak to another of his kind for the first time in millennia. It was a lie that his mind held to firmly, trying not to think about how he’d began to open his heart long before the Goddess’s power alighted upon her.

(He tried not to think about how beautiful she looked in the gardens, her back to the old gazebo, carving pieces of wood with a pocket knife. He tried not to think about how her wild hair looked so _lovely_ pinned into a messy bun, loose strands framing her face like brush strokes, and the ancient warmth it threatened to awake in him.)

More than anything, she was _honest_ , and perhaps that was why. That paradoxical straightforwardness that ran contrary to her mysterious origin. He had never known her to gossip or betray, and it was a trait that Seteth valued fiercely.

If she knew his past, his deeds, his _name,_ then who would she tell? For some reason, a foolish, giddy part of him _wanted_ her to find out, believed wholeheartedly she would keep the secret.

Still, he did not flinch at her asking for his copy of Cichol’s General Treatise on Mercenaries. Nor did he tip his hand at her asking what he thought of it, remarking on his well–worn first edition and his knowledge on the subject of Cichol’s many volumes throughout the years. She asked about how the mercenaries of her time — _their_ time, she’d corrected — compared to those of yore, and he’d innocently remarked that he would scarcely know better than she did.

But when she asked what he thought not of the book, but of Cichol himself, with a tone that indicated she was on the cusp of puzzling it out — he could not help but _wink_ at her, even knowing it was beyond foolhardy. After all, one mistake could end all of this that they’d built.

And yet, Seteth felt younger than he had in centuries. His heart nearly seized in his chest when Byleth smirked in return.

How ridiculous that he’d been worrying about unsavory individuals being a bad influence on Flayn. All this time, Flayn had been the bad influence, and on _him_ , no less.

Byleth’s smirk kept him up many nights, wondering. Was it so terrible, to trust humans? His brothers would say so. Rhea certainly would, if she were here. If you’d asked Seteth 50 years ago, or even 5, he would have said yes.

But — if not for himself, then for Flayn — Seteth had decided to at least _try_.

It caught up with him one morning, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes as he sat down at his desk, only to nearly fall out of his chair with surprise. There was something blatantly amiss — a small item on the desk like an offering, sitting atop existing mountains of paperwork from the evening prior.

Perhaps it wouldn’t have been so disturbing, had it not meant that someone had managed to get past his locked office door during the night. Someone, likely still on the monastery grounds, had been capable of not only doing so, but sneaking back out without causing alarm. They were at war, for Goddess’s sake.

If they could pick their way past his lock, then Flayn...

Seteth quickly shook himself out of it, forcing himself not to remember that dark time when she’d been taken from him. He’d been trying, to varying degrees of success, to force himself not to worry _quite_ so much about her whereabouts, especially when Byleth took her out regularly on missions. Not to mention that panicking was unacceptable for a man who had become, more or less, the second–in–charge of a rebellion.

And that was when his mind finally registered what was actually _on_ his stack of paperwork, leaving him feeling rather silly for the gravity of his reaction. The foreign object was... a harmless–looking wood carving.

Seteth reached forward to pick it up, only to startle when it came apart into two pieces, worrying he’d somehow broken it already. But on closer inspection, it appeared that it was, in fact, _two_ wood carvings; made to fit against each other as a pair. Crudely made and unpainted, almost certainly handcrafted and not bought.

The flat planes of the first figure puzzled him, sitting with its head upright like a guard dog, and he turned it this way and that to examine it. The wings were obvious, blocky as they were. Then horns — a wyvern, perhaps? No, the body wasn’t nearly stocky enough. And much too long...

The second figure, then. This one was supposed to be laying down, he supposed. It was a bit small, and its rough composition made it look more like a blob with a snout and wings, but it registered as an abstract sleeping figure well enough. He recalled the cats on the monastery grounds, curled up into colorful lumps in the sun, and wondered if perhaps they lent a bit of inspiration.

Then he placed them together as they’d been before, and all at once, the artist’s intention became clear. They were two roughly–cut wooden _dragons_ , one large and standing sentinel, one small and sleeping. A parent and child... or perhaps, a father and a daughter.

The warmth in his heart that he’d once had, long–buried like slumbering sprouts under a long winter, suddenly grew and unfurled. It filled his cheeks with a pleasant flush, made him smile so broadly that his eyes stung with unshed tears. That simple image, cut with a rough hand yet made with a profound kindness, meant more to him than words could possibly say.

Yes, Byleth knew entirely too much. And Seteth found that he didn’t mind in the slightest.

**Author's Note:**

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